Potatoes for Christmas - Shurtugal

Moderator

Some of you may remember that about a year ago, a few of the moderators wanted to kick some life into Dragonspiral Tower. We created a thread called "Poster of the Month" in which good posters were recognized for their efforts throughout the month. Such users were awarded with a custom title. Some even moved up the ranks: user Pocket, our first PotM, is now an OU moderator, the same tier for which he received the award. Another noteworthy user is Birkal, who became our first Community Contributor () for starting and maintaining the Dark Horse Project. He now sports 5 little icons under his name and is a super moderator who moderates every forum and participates in the decisions of senior staff (,) and the Pokemon Showdown! server (). Oh yeah, he's a pretty nifty artist () as well! He has obtained all of these little symbols in a time period of almost a year, which is an astounding growth rate!

Now that DST is in Thread Cryonics (aka Smogon purgatory), Poster of the Month is lost forever. However, I have decided to bring back an equivalent system. I present you, the Poster of the Arbitrary Time Period (PotATp or Potato) award! A month is way too long, causing a ton of competition for little/infrequent award. This time around the posting period will be much shorter, but still somewhat flexible. In OU I envision about one to two weeks. By winning the Potato Award, your name will be featured in this stickied thread for all to see. By winning it multiple times (not necessarily in a row and not too many times), you are eligible for further awards, potentially adding some pixel candy to your post bit.

What defines a good poster, you may ask? Well, I'll try to break down a list of criteria. Please note that this list is by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a good idea on how to succeed.

Make quality posts. Overall, your posts should be worth reading. Readers of your posts will gain insight about the topic at hand or the metagame in general. You participate in projects and help out in the Simple Questions / Answers thread. Your posts are coherent and to the point. Your posts are mature. I'm not saying you're a statue and you have to be stoic, but there is a place for humor. You know how to use it in moderation.

Know and follow the rules. You don't create new threads just to ask a question. You don't flame other users or act like an idiot. You don't whine about banning / unbanning stuff. You check to see if a thread about (insert Pokemon/Item/Move/whatever) has not already been made or is not already active. You don't necro bump posts.

Keep out of trouble. You don't have any active infractions.

If you can follow these simple rules and use your common sense, you are already on your way to being a Potato!

Award systems like these are soon to be put up in the other Smogon Metagames subforums (Ubers, RU, NU, hopefully more), so if you know several metagames, you can branch out and be a Potato throughout multiple forums.

Feel free to post any questions here. Know that I am a stubborn man and am not likely to change any of the criteria here so posting suggestions on how to run this is sort of a waste of time.

Moderator

After 6 long weeks, the OU moderators have decided on our next potato: Shurtugal! Shurtugal, with the help of CTC and Eclypse, wrote an amazing guide on, simply, how to win. In this guide are step-by-step battle techniques from Team Preview, Risk and Reward, Prediction, Mid-game, and End-game, among many others. The thread was very well received and is a great read for new players. Please welcome a warm round of applause for Shurtugal!
Shitty album, shitty band, but great award!